Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance

by Alex Hutchinson

In a wide variety of human activity, achievement is not possible without discomfort.

The limits of endurance running, according to physiologists, could be quantified with three parameters: aerobic capacity, also known as VO2max, which is analogous to the size of a car’s engine; running economy, which is an efficiency measure like gas mileage; and lactate threshold, which dictates how much of your engine’s power you can sustain for long periods of time.

A suitably versatile definition that I like, borrowing from researcher Samuele Marcora, is that endurance is “the struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop.” That’s actually Marcora’s description of “effort” rather than endurance

Run a lot of miles Some faster than your race pace Rest once in a while